Margaret Cavendish

Gender, genre, exile

Emma L.E. Rees

Cavendish is fast becoming a canonical figure - most renaissance and seventeenth-century scholars will know her

Intellectual rigour is matched by a vibrant sense of Cavendish's extraordinary life and struggle to make her voice heard

New reading of the work of one of the most prolific, complex and misunderstood writers of the seventeenth century, who engaged with the work of thinkers like Lucretius, Homer, Plato and Harvey, amongst others

Rees shows how literary genre can be used as the key to understanding Cavendish's oeuvre

This is the first monograph to focus on her exile publications (she was banished by the Cromwellian regime), and to demonstrate how she may be read as a key player in the intellectual traditions of the period

Margaret Cavendish

Gender, genre, exile

Emma L.E. Rees

Description

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most prolific, complex and misunderstood writers of the seventeenth century. A contemporary of Descartes and Hobbes, she was fascinared by philosophical, scientific and imaginitive advances, and struggled to overcome the political and cultural obstacles which threatened to stop her engagement with such discourses.

The result of this struggle is a body of work of twenty two opulent editions, some of which were extraordinary not only because they were penned by a woman, but because they were published in the 1650s when Cavendish and her husband were in exile on the continent. Persona non grata, Cavendish nonetheless managed to make her voice heard. Quite what that voice was saying becomes more evident in Emma Ree's study where literary genre is seen to be the key to an understanding of it.

Emma Rees examines how Cavendish engaged with the work of thinkers such as Lucretius, Plato, Homer and Harvey in an attempt to write her way out of the exile which threatened not only her intellectual pursuits but her very existence. What emerges is the image of an intelligent, audacious and intrepid early-modern woman whose tale will appeal to specialists and general readers alike.